Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This time the ecological agenda goes beyond Earth Day folk songs and the old tree-hugger concerns of toxics, smog and the deterioration of national parks. Those disgraceful problems still persist. But they have been overshadowed by a realization that the world's life-support system may be on the brink of a breakdown because of carbon-dioxide loads, chlorofluorocarbon residues and forest destruction. The earth and its atmosphere are drowning in man-made wastes, a situation that has become so critical it may soon make other political issues -- even budget deficits and military needs -- seem trivial. Yet the dire...
...substances that are necessary to fuel the economies of industrialized nations and warm Third World families. Cleaning up a polluted river or a waste dump is often a mammoth task, but it requires that a community decide it is worth the cost and effort. Stemming the destruction of the earth's atmosphere, on the other hand, will require a national and international effort to change the way that economies run and lives are lived...
...complex environmental problem is the greenhouse effect. The industrial age has been fueled by the burning of coal, wood and oil, which spews wastes -- most notably carbon dioxide (CO2) -- into the sky. This thickens the layer of atmospheric gases that traps heat from the sun and keep the earth warm. This greenhouse effect is expected to bring about more change more quickly than any other climatic event in the earth's history. Scientists warn that the changes cannot be stopped, though they can be slowed. But the time is short. Says Robert Dickinson, a senior scientist at the National Center...
Never before had the world received so stunning a glimpse of a Soviet space crisis. Cramped inside a tiny capsule 155 miles above the earth, Commander Vladimir Lyakhov radioed mission control that something was desperately wrong. Seated beside him was a hastily trained Afghan cosmonaut, Abdul Ahad Mohmand. Replied a ground controller: "How are things with food?" Lyakhov: "There is no food." Controller: "What about the emergency rations?" Lyakhov: "They are there, but why touch them? We will be patient," he added, noting that there was no way to rid themselves of wastes...
...decelerate the spacecraft from its orbital speed for the descent into the atmosphere. Accounts of what happened next differ, but indications are that as the ship passed through a twilight region of space between day and night, an infrared sensor, which fixes the spacecraft's position in relation to earth, was confused by rays of sunlight. The unexpected signal caused the computer to abort the normal firing...